‘Have one on the house, old man? Not staying, are you? Pity, we’ve no guests at the moment. Staff problems.’ Mrs Lyttleton-Stampe produced a writing compendium stuffed with papers. ‘I might have it here. Somedreadful place, I remember. North east.’
‘We were prepared to make allowances, give her a chance. But she was completely unsuitable, old chap, didn’t last five minutes —’
‘Do you know, there was one occasion when she satdownnext to Lady Ryecroft. Actually. Where you are now,at the bar.It was her day off, so I suppose she thought she could sit where she pleased’ —
Henry felt the beginnings of a headache and put it down to the combined effects of the beer, the company and impatience. Several hundred miles’ round trip in the rain had at least yielded something in the way of fact — but with Mrs Lyttleton-Stampe leaning envelopingly over him, her face taut with spite, he thought he was paying bloody dear for it. All on Cass’s whim. He took out his notebook and pen, hoping the action would prompt Mrs Lyttleton-Stampe to give her gin a rest and get on with sorting through her papers. ‘When did she leave you?’
‘April. She was on a month’s notice but she didn’t work it.Girls never do these days, there ought to be some law. She took her wages instead —’
I bet she had a hard job getting them out of you, you mean old sow, this place doesn’t look as if it does enough business to keep a parrot in comfort. Poor Leonora. If she did nothing else she’s left you with a fund of hysterical memories.
‘I suppose she’s been trying to get a situation in the meanwhile; she certainly didn’t have apennyto live on, I know that. No one’s approached us for a reference, though. I couldn’t possiblygive one, you understand,’ Mrs Lyttleton-Stampe leered, repulsively flirtatious.
‘She’d have gone back to her family from here, I suppose,’ Henry said desperately.
‘I doubt she had one, those girls are often orphans, foundlings, or something, that’s why they go intoservice. She did say something about a sick father, going back to him, but we couldn’t believe awordshe said. Is this it, I wonder? We had to send her cards on, we hadn’t stamped them while she was here. Quite frankly, I grudged theexpense. But we took advice and found we had to. Ye-es I think this must be her address.’
Neatly, rapidly, Henry took the paper from her and began to copy from it. The landlord, groggily determined, said, ‘Remember now. She wrote for a couple of jobs while she was here — using her home address, said she was going back to see if there were any replies.’
‘Underhand,’ his wife hissed. ‘Just the sort of underhand tricks girls get up to. And we daren’t trust her with the men,daren’t trust her. I could tell you some stories, Mr Beaumont ...’ She had let herself out from the bar and was sidling up, closing in on him, her eyes avid. He fled.
*
When he got back to Marchstearn the slate-grey day was pelting rain. The pain of the threatened headache, refusing to yield to ordinary anodynes, was swelling viciously behind his eyes. Very occasionally he suffered from crippling attacks of migraine; the twist of nausea in his stomach warned him one was coming on and as he had left his special pills in his flat there was nothing he could do but endure it till it passed. He telephoned Cass, closing his eyes as the sound of her voice shattered straight through his skull.
‘Darling, that’s wonderful — her address. All right, an address. Well, it’s in your part of the world, sort of. And you’re going home tomorrow, you can set out early and go there first.’
He did not have the strength to protest that his part of the world was extremely large and he would have to set out at dawn, instead, he muttered, ‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know whether to tell her,’ Cass mused. ‘I don’t think so, something factual might precipitate flight, you can just never tell with her. What were they like — at the pub?’
‘Detestable.’
‘Yes? Really? How long was she there?’
‘Five minutes.’
‘What? Henry, why are you being so bloody cryptic?’
‘I’ve got a terrible migraine.’
‘Darling, I’m sorry. Just hang on, though, andtell.’
‘I can’t, Cass, I’m going to be sick —’ Nausea clutched at him; he slammed down the receiver and staggered up the stairs.
*
He heard the rain. He heard the rain swelling in volume as sleep stole away the gigantic confused nightmares of pain. After being sick for the second time he had got undressed, pulled on slacks and jersey and gone to lie on the bed. It seemed a century ago. He moved his head, wary of its befuddled ache, and through the undrawn bedroom curtains saw the rectangle of night sky, starless and deep. He groped for his watch, giving up the effort after a while and sinking back into sleep.
The rain drummed relentlessly, falling straight down from the blackness of the night, drowning the occasional settling creaks of the house. An alien sound, an imminence of movement, crept to the borders of his consciousness. He half opened his eyes and saw with blurred gaze, unastonished, unwelcome, the figure of Leonora beside his bed.
There was a moment when he thought he was dreaming, when the hideous chill of the nightmares clutched his body, releasing it slowly as he lay unmoving, until he murmured, ‘Go away.’
Her sweet voice spoke soothingly, ‘You’re not well. No. You’ll be better now.’ She put her hand weightlessly on his forehead. He experienced again a terrible cold, the last of the pain dissolving beneath her touch.
He opened his eyes wider, breathing in the damp, seeing in the shrouded light her outline flattened and streaming. ‘Leonora — you’re drowned.’
‘Mmm. I’ll get dry in a minute. I’m going to make you a drink. Lie there.’
But first she crossed the room, moving without haste, her sodden clothes dragging round her. Crouching down, she struck a match and put it to the fire. His desire to move was stilled upon a dream-like acceptance of this unknown, peaceful creature who filled the room with her chill, profound presence, this Leonora once again transformed: a mermaid from the deep caverns of the sea, an attendant spirit of the swollen river.
She seemed not so much to go away as to melt withdrawingly into the area of the room that lay beyond the flickering reach of the fire. Then it seemed she came and went, blending with the light that touched his tired eyes, putting something beside his bed, moving out of sight, reappearing again in his dressing gown, curling before the fire to dry her hair.
He blinked, sat up.
‘Drink your tea, it’ll do you good,’ she said, not looking at him, speaking from the veil of her dense, fire-sparkled hair.
He did as she said. The hot, sweet tea tasted wonderful to his parched tongue. There was nothing strange about their silent companionability, it seemed that she belonged to his house in a way he could never belong to it, so much a part of it he had been breathing her in the air from the moment he had first entered it. Memory was without sequence: she had always been there, of course. When he stood beneath the chestnut trees she had looked into his house, into his eyes — and gone away. And when she had returned (from where? What limbo, what timeless space contained her when she was not material to his gaze?) all the clocks in the house had known. Curiosity stirred in him, slow, intense, reaching back into unplaceable areas of his mind, impelling him to movement. He got up and went to sit beside her on the rug in front of the fire.
The logs sputtered and flared, glancing off her hair, illuminating the pile of wet garments pushed to one side of the hearth. ‘They won’t dry like that. Why are you so quiet? I don’t know you, do I? Who are you, Leonora?’ She turned her thoughtful face to him; without her spectacles her eyes were huge and lustrous. ‘Who am I?’ she repeated, and sat silent for a while, serenely considering. ‘I don’t know. You’re going to find out for me, aren’t you?’
He had a vast knowledge, for one untraceable moment, of every single thing about her; but it was a dream sensation, lost in the instant he spoke. ‘Why did you come here? Why did you come at Sama
in?’
Again she considered, lifting and letting fall long strands of her floating hair. He forgot what he had asked her, beguiled into thinking there was no sight in the world so graceful as a woman drying her long hair in the firelight.
‘Why did I come? Someone called me.’
He drew closer to her, puzzled. ‘Called you?’
‘From here. From this house.’
He tried to make sense of this, distantly; it was important and yet — such was their closeness, their stillness — it was meaningless. ‘But ... Who?’
She smiled, shook her head.
‘When? That night? There was no one here.’
‘That night ... a century ago ... I don’t know. Does it matter? The call found its time, the time found me.’ She smiled, reached out, and with her chill, weightless fingers touched his hand.
‘You’re still cold.’ He moved closer to her, a movement arrested only for an unmeasurable space when she looked at him, the sweet blur of a smile on her lips; then she leaned against him, softly, and he found the warmth of her body with his own.
They did not speak; he did not think. He touched her hair, her face, drew his hand down and untied the sash of the dressing gown. The silky stuff ran away from her like water, sliding down the serene and sensuous body, opening it to the gold of the fire. In the fullness of her breasts and hips and thighs, the satiny roundness of her stomach, she was voluptuous, utterly female; she was every woman he had ever known, all the women he would never know, familiar to him and yet totally mysterious, part of him and yet separate. He knew every beat of her heart, knew the blood moving in her veins as he knew his own blood, and in the complex pattern of his own desires he knew his eroticism stilled, hers subtly inviting.
He thought of Cass, of his vanquished pride; and Leonora, smiling as if she knew, smiled as he drew his fingers caressingly down to the warm fleece beneath the swell of her stomach. She parted her legs a little, making a barely audible sound in her throat as he found the loving and giving sleekness of her, and looked steadily into his eyes until her luminous gaze clouded; then he sensed her quickening, saw her face tilt up, and put his mouth on hers to taste her soft, velvet cry.
She seemed to sleep, leaning against him, and he drifted, staring at the fire, at the golden shadows licking softly over her skin. It had been the most natural thing in the world: his tribute to her womanliness, her return of the pride Cass had taken away.
She murmured, ‘I must go now.’
‘No ... no, Stay. You can’t go. Look, your clothes haven’t begun to dry. Stay with me tonight, I’ll dry them for you. There are things I must talk to you about, say to you, tell you —’
‘No, Henry, it’s time for me to go now. You’re tired, and you’ll be up early. Your headache’s gone, it won’t come back.’ She reached her hand up, putting her fingertips to his eyelids; he heard the rain, the roar of the distant river, a chill came to him again and it seemed that a web of sleep floated about him as her voice echoed down a long, whispering darkness ...It’s time for me to go now ...
Regretful, restless, he shut up his empty house at dawn and drove away.
*
The three poplars were there, elegant autumn skeletons in a stark landscape; it was a long time since he had come across a rural view so unpleasing to the eye, so wearying, so monotonous to the senses. And Leonora’s country home was no more than a shack, an untenanted shack surrounded by rubbish in a scrubby piece of ground. It was plain the place had been unused for some time, months to judge by the deadened tangle of weeds sprawled across the broken path.
He walked round slowly. The doors were just about sound enough to keep out intruders, and the windows — curtained by some once bright material sagging along on wire. The view through the smeared panes showed poverty-stricken furniture, grubby walls on which cheap prints hung askew, withered leaves in a jam jar on a bare table. He told himself there was nothing to be gained by staring in, neighbours could be the only source of information; but a heaviness of spirit had come over him at the sight of the place where Leonora had presumably spent her childhood ...
Which Leonora, though? Who was she? How many personalities were yet to be discovered in the bewildering woman? And had he dreamed last night of a goddess gold in the firelight?
The shack lay at the end of a short lane; on his drive down it he had glimpsed only one house, set at an angle between the main road and the lane, just visible above a high hawthorn hedge. He walked the short distance and going in through a demolished gate to yet another overgrown place his heart sank. This was the neglect of years, this viciously bramble-clutched house with its sagging roof and broken windows, crumbling in on itself, wrecked by the weather, disuse, passing vagrants.
He went in and at once caught his breath at the strange thickening of the air. Exploring, opening rotted cupboards, touching fabric that shredded in his hand, he tried to put aside a growing feeling of uneasiness. His mind extended to and encompassed his true motive for being there: a hawthorn hedge surrounding the next property ... it was there she was imprisoned ... her life was a great tragedy ... a great mystery ...
Was it all a figment of Leonora’s imagination? Or had the child Helen really been here, spirited away from Marchstearn and hidden in this remote house? What possible connection had there been then? What link left now to be revealed?
This is a foul place, he thought. There was a smell of excreta, human or animal, of rotting vegetation; the rooms were shut off, one from another, by narrow, windowless passages. The uneasiness he had tried to quell expanded to a feeling close to dread, swooping suddenly, as if some unbreathing presence that had shifted behind his back at last reached out to touch him. He whirled round, starting up a cloud of dust that at once settled stiflingly around him. His flesh crawled; as he tried to draw breath it seemed the very air of the place was suffocated by the memory of evil.
He forced himself to walk at a reasonable pace down a passage and into the stone-flagged kitchen, but there he was horrified to find his limbs shaking violently. He paused and was at once seized by a brief, violent vertigo that set the room slewing and vibrating around him. Before the seizure had passed he was lurching out into the fresh air, gulping for breath, the claw of panic releasing him as he straightened, shook his head, clearing his confused senses. He was covered in an unpleasant, clammy sweat as he walked away, the clutch of the place close about him until he entered the lane and returned to his car.
That was nasty, Henry lad. What happened?
He smoked a cigarette, leaning against the car. The only way towards an explanation would be to discover more about the abandoned house and he set his mind working on how to go about that. On his way in he had driven through the centre of a small town that clung, depressingly ugly, to the side of a roaring A road; unless there was a bigger town further on he would make for that and ... He looked about, musing ... An estate agent? That one-horse place must boast of one. A possible start.
In the car he checked his bearings on the ordnance survey map, deciding that the small town was the nearest point of sizeable habitation. As he was about to fold the map something caught his eye: the red gothic M that designated an ancient monument, in this case a single word: henge. It lay roughly three miles due north of his present location.
A thought turned in his mind. He looked along the base of the map, in roughly a direct downward line, and saw a moat marked in the same lettering. Since living in
Marchstearn he had picked up scraps of lore regarding leys and once, with the aid of a perspex ruler and a map he had plotted the leys around the area and been astonished to discover how many converged on Marchstearn itself. It was said that occasionally people experienced inexplicable sensations when they crossed a certain ley line — sensations until that moment unknown to him. But for all his practicality, his cynicism, he was not inclined to dismiss what he had just experienced as an errant attack of nerves.
He reached to the back seat of the car, searching for someth
ing to improvise as a ruler. Amongst the various odds and ends he had put there when he loaded his car in the dawn he found a magazine, that would do. As he slid it forward its movement dislodged a book. He saw with surprise that it was Max Holme’s book — which he had put in the car meaning to return to the library and completely forgotten.
He used the folded edge of the magazine for a rule. It was a fumbling job and he was prompted more by instinct than by rational thought; but he did know that the course of leys that had long since disappeared could be plotted by certain features that had survived the passing of centuries and would still be marked on modern maps: ancient monuments, old place names, high points of the landscape.
His improvised rule was just long enough to allow him to align the henge in the north with the moat in the south. He had read somewhere that at least four mark points were essential to prove evidence of a ley and on the imaginary line between north and south he found them: a place called High Rise, 1500 feet above sea level; a hamlet called Hollow, where an old ford was marked, another henge close to a crossroads; a small gathering of tumuli, or burial mounds. He admitted amateurism, but even taking that into account he had confirmation enough that a ley passed straight through the house he had just left.
And he knew that given patience, time and a large enough map, he could plot the course of the vanished and still existing leys that covered the country, an intricate maze of angles and triangles and converging lines — and find one ley that linked this place with Marchstearn.
15
He had been betrayed.
In his shuttered rooms in the vast house day and night meant nothing to him, he did not know how much time had passed since the witch-woman had reached from her grave and caused the sending of the Samain creature; it seemed always to be a mere moment since it was advancing into the circle, its unmasked face stark in the moonlight. But time was eating into him, physically, furtively, measured in the knowledge of its waiting, of his strength running out, riveted to its presence.
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